4. The frequent source of new leads for targets seems to be newcomers who know somebody they want to hack and have stumbled onto one of the networks offering services via search terms or a forum they frequent. The new contributor will offer up a Facebook profile link, plus as much information as is required by the hacker to break the account, plus possible assistance in getting a RAT installed if required. In exchange the hacker and ripped will supply the person providing the lead with a copy of the extracted data, which they will also keep for themselves. This was one of the most unsettling aspects of these networks to me – knowing there are people out there who are turning over data on friends in their social networks in exchange for getting a dump of their private data.

5. In reviewing months worth of forum posts, image board posts, private emails, replies for requests for services, etc. nowhere was the FindMyPhone API brute force technique (revealed publicly and exploited in iBrute) mentioned. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t used privately by the hackers – but judging by the skill levels involved, the mentions and tutorials around other techniques and some of the bragged about success rates with social engineering, recovery, resets, rats and phishing – it appears that such techniques were not necessary or never discovered.

6. iCloud is the most popular target because Picture Roll backups are enabled by default and iPhone is a popular platform. Windows Phone backups are available on all devices but are disabled by default (it is frequently enabled, although I couldn’t find a statistic) while Android backup is provided by third party applications (some of which are targets).

Edit Turns out that Google+ provides backup functionality for photos uploaded via the app, something I missed when checking Android. Thanks James for clarifying in comments.

7. Apple accounts seem particularly vulnerable because of the recovery process, password requirements and ability to detect if an email address has an associated iCloud account. The recovery process is broken up into steps and will fail at each point. While Apple do not reveal if an email address is a valid iCloud address as part of the recover process, they do reveal if it is valid or not if you attempt to sign up a new account using the same email – so verification (or brute force attempts) are simple. The second step is verifying the date of birth and it will pass or fail based on that data alone so can be guessed, while the last step are the two security questions. It would be a good idea for Apple to kill the interface on signup that shows new users if their email account is available to use as an iCloud account or not. It would also be a good idea to make the recovery process one big step where all data is validated at once and the user is not given a specific error message. It would also be wise to attach rate limits and strict lockout on this process on a per-account basis.

Being able to POST an email address to https://appleid.apple.com/account/validation/appleid and getting back a response indicating if it is a valid account or not, with little to no rate limiting, is a bug.

7. a) edit To reiterate what the main bugs are that are being exploited here, roughly in order of popularity / effectiveness:

Password reset (secret questions / answers)
Phishing email
Password recovery (email account hacked)
Social engineering / RAT install / authentication keys
7. b) Once they have access to the account they have access to everything – they can locate the phone, retrieve SMS and MMS messages, recover deleted files and photos, remote wipe the device and more. The hackers here happen to focus on private pictures, but they had complete control of these accounts for a period.

8. Authentication tokens can be stolen by a trojan (or social engineered) from a computer with iTunes installed easily. Elcomsoft provide a tool called atex which does this. On OS X the token is installed in the keychain. The authentication token is as good as a password.

9. Two-factor authentication for iCloud is useless in preventing passwords or authentication tokens being used to extract online backups. 2fa is used to protect account details and updates.

10. There is an insane amount of hacking going on. On any day there are dozens of forum and image board users offering their services. While many of those offering to rip alone based on being provided a username and password are scammers, they will still steal the data and sell it or trade it.

11. OPSEC level of the average user in these networks is low. 98% of email addresses provided in forums as part of advertising or promoting services are with the usual popular providers (gmail, outlook, yahoo) who are not Tor friendly. Most users speak of using VPNs when breaking into accounts and suggest which VPNs are best, fastest and “most anonymous.” It was also incredibly easy for some of those involved in distribution of the latest leaks to be publicly identified (more on that later) and for servers with dumps to be found, etc.

12. The darknet forums provide a lot of tips in terms of the hacking steps and also provide databases of passwords, users and dox but in terms of distributing content are usually a step behind the publicly available image boards. They are definitely more resilient in terms of keeping content up once it is published, and might become more popular with users if more data is leaked. Overchan and Torchan have in the past day or longer been full of new users requesting darknet links to the leaked content, and they receive them.